11.12 - Give Up
Click or tap if you trust this link. Friday, March 24, 2023
12h edition of the 11th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter
ITU 2023 Future Networked Car Symposium: Automated Driving Systems (ADS) for Consumers and Other Vehicles (Trucks, Delivery, Shuttles, Robotaxis, Etc.)
R. Lanctot, March 12, "Full automation of the driving task appears tantalizingly close. Multiple use cases are emerging simultaneously, revealing potential paths to market adoption and consumer acceptance. The evolution of these use cases will determine the future of ADS. This panel will review the emerging ADS applications – consumer vehicles, commercial vehicles, delivery vehicles, shuttles, robotaxis – to better understand the challenges and opportunities associated with ADS technology and the state of development and market adoption…."
Hmmmm….. After almost 15 years of substantive testing (the Google effort started in 2009) and almost 20 years since the first DARPA Challenge, we are still only "… revealing potential paths to market adoption and consumer acceptance …"???
Isn't it about time that this teenager start delivering some tangible return to its "parents" and society. For what is supposed to be such a disruptive technology it has yet to identify the market where it has decisive cost or quality advantage over the existing firms. (over the existing solutions it is trying to replace.)
It might be as safe as good drivers (It might be safer than bad drivers), but it has no chance anytime soon to being disruptively safer. It is not disruptively more fun to drive. Just ride around with it, that's a service, not a possession. It has no chance at being a consumer vehicle.
ADS has equally no chance at replacing commercial vehicle drivers. Helping professional drivers have an enhanced workplace? Yes! Removing them from their workplace? No!
Some special purposed deliveries in the middle of the night? Maybe.
Shuttles… at best a very small one-off niche with no opportunity to be disruptive.
Robotaxis designed and operated so as to serve rich ride-hailers and the chauffeured limousine market? Good luck! Service quality is really important and price is essentially irrelevant (these folks are rich and/or are traveling on an expense account). It is a non-trivial challenge for Robotaxis to deliver service quality approaching that of Uber/Lyft/Limo; so at best, these Robotaxis can only nip at the heels of Uber/Lyft/Limo, which itself is way less than 1% of the daily vehicle person-trips under 50 miles in length. Even if Robotaxis got'em all, there's nowhere near enough to justify any continued investment here.
These conundrums are NOT what was discussed in this session.
Unfortunately, what was also not discussed or realized is that there does exist an enormous market for demand-responsive Robotaxi service that is affordable. 50% of the people in the U.S. are not physically able to drive a car, or are not financially able to own one for themselves. They still need to get to work, to shops, to medical and rehab facilities, to school, to friends, to … and the fact that they cannot readily and affordably affects their well-being and the health of the entire country. This is a huge market where a demand-responsive and affordable service is disruptive because it delivers mobility to those who need a ride but are not being served by any transport alternatives which they can afford. THAT'S WHERE DRIVERLESS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE! Affordability is really important to those who are paying for their own travel and are non-rich. Thus, affordable, demand responsive Robotaxi service can readily be the best consumer choice for that 50%.
The addressable market here is ~150M people over the age of 10, wishing to make ~500M person trips a day in the USA that don't have their own car waiting around for them to drive it to take them where they want to go at the drop of a hat. To offer them with on-demand affordable Robotaxis service that is almost as well (and maybe even better) as if they did have that personal car, would be very disruptive to some, even many and eventually "all". A well-managed (100 person trips per day per Robotaxi, 20% profit margin) fleet of 5M Robotaxis could serve essentially all. Serving 1% would need 50,000. Serving a targeted opportunity representing the first 0.001% would require 50. This panel made no mention of this use case. No mention of the business case.
Let's continue this panel discussion at the 6th Princeton SmartDrivingCars Summit in May 22->24. A major part of the Summit is devoted to this one topic: Delivering Mobility to the Non-mobile. We're going to talk about the business case, something that is sorely missing in public discussion so far. Alain
SmartDrivingCars ZoomCast 310 / PodCast 310
- 0:00 F. Fishkin, March 24, "Where does autonomous mobility go from here? Princeton's Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin explore...plus Ford's EV losses, SMART grants fail to fund autonomous mobility, Waymo, drones & more.
- 0:35 Princeton basketball
- 1:25 More thoughts in aftermath of ITU 2023 Future Networked Car Symposium. Where does autonomous mobility go from here?
- 29:26 SMART grants from DOT fail to fund autonomous mobility
- 31:55 Ford's EV losses
- 32:57 Ford updates on BlueOval City mega site in West Tennessee
- 34:46 Waymo takes on task of writing the safety case for AVs. Alain emphasizes that companies shouldn't compete on safety
- 39:25 The Street headline… Four reasons self-driving cars, not drones, will deliver your packages.
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SafeDrivingCars: Those in which the automated function are explicitly designed to not only substantially reduce driver misbehavior by constraining the performance characteristic such as incorporating speed governors that only permit excessive speeds in geofenced locations such as Watkins Glen International and stretches of the German Autobahn, but also automatically intervene to prevent crashes; thus, extending what is done today with anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control.
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SelfDrivingCars: Those which allow the driver for some extended period of time to be "feet-off" the brake & throttle, delivering to the driver substantial comfort & convenience, but also "hands-off" the wheel for shorter periods of time providing a little more comfort & convenience. Absolutely required are "eyes & brain" focused the human task of driving, ready to intervene should the automated driver begin to fail.
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DriverlessCars: Those which serve only passengers and/or goods from trip start, through finish. Luckily, the notion that individuals might own such vehicles for personal use and/or be able to "AirB&B" them for others to get from A to B is now realized by essentially everyone as exceedingly naïve. The Mercedes booth at this year's CES showed no sign of its Mercedes Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion | LIVE PREMIERE CES 2015. Yea!
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Click ">Sunday, October 30, 2022
- Hawkins, Oct. 27, "When Ford announced yesterday that it was pulling its support for Argo AI, the autonomous driving startup it had financed since 2017, it cited as one of its reasons a belief that driver-assist technology will have more near-term payoffs....." Read more Hmmmm... I agree with Andrew, as I stated above. Alain
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- Tesla FSD Beta V 10.69 Dominates Downtown Driving
- FSD Beta 10.69 (2022.16.3.10) Release Notes
- FSDBeta v10.69 - HEAVY TRAFFIC - Unprotected Left Turns... Amazing that such turns are legal let alone FSD's routing algorithm deciding that this is on the best way to go. Safety must not be part of its objective function C'mon Elon.
- FSD Beta V 10.69 Initial Impressions. My impression is that 10.69 drove better than this tester who seemed intent on driving aggressively and not wanting to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Hopefully no one at Tesla pays attention to this guy.
- Bullish News From Giga Berlin Tours, Production Rumors, Terrible Toyota
- The Tesla Semi Is Officially Here!
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These systems outrageously reduce crash probabilities, and/or
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maybe some, but we're probably not much luckier.
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very few of the cars in use during that "10" month period had Level 2 capabilities, and/or
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unfortunately, the VIN number doesn't identify these cars and only Tesla announces how many sold (I may have missed the reportings)
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very few of the drivers of those cars rarely engaged the Level 2 features, and/or
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likely. Only Tesla releases data on the utilization of its level 2 features but does so only in aggregate terms that don't allow for correction of sampling bias associated with engagement in "easy" driving conditions versus "challenging" driving conditions.
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enormous under counting
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likely, only Tesla has the opportunity to either "know all" or sample effectively because of their OtA monitoring of its vehicles. Everyone else has conveniently kept their heads in the sand. Mercedes didn't report any; however, during that period I think my Intelligent Cruise Control and Lane Centering were engaged when I hit a deer. Mercedes must not have been watching me, I didn't report it and I didn't get the memo that informed me to do anything.
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- those that don't already have a stable full of their own personal mobility options.
- those for which his aTaxi can substantially change their lives for the better.
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Person Trip Length (90%tile): 10 miles
Cost:
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